Challenges with Private Food Grain Stocks
The private players in the food grain stocks market in Bangladesh mainly include farmers, millers, traders, retailers or households. The access to data on private stocks of food grains and their monitoring at a national level, like in most countries, is a big challenge for the Government. There is absolutely no mechanism to capture and monitor the private stocks held by them, and share the information with Government for a national level consolidation. Proper information about food stock positions at the national level is critical for setting the domestic and export prices, acts as an indicator of food availability and is also an important measure for country’s food security. It is important to ensure complete information about food stocks since policymakers might need them to intervene whenever markets witness spikes in prices.
There are many sources of inefficiency associated with the existing initiatives of developing a nationwide private sector food grain stock monitoring system till date. An important problem is the inadequate identification of millers, traders, retailers and households to collect the data, which has resulted in exclusion of eligible stakeholders and inclusion of ineligible stakeholders, leading to misleading data coverage and accuracy. Another major shortcoming is the lack of feasible and acceptable ICT intervention for the stakeholders coupled with some benefit realisation mechanism, which would motivate the stakeholders to submit timely and accurate data for reporting. Moreover lack of any single source of truth has earlier resulted in data redundancy due to collection of overlapping data points from multiple sources, and this has given misleading and confusing results on private stocks.
Read this: Privately held Buffer Stock Management
Can we bring them under National Monitoring System
Currently the stock monitoring initiative of Government is confined to the food grains stored in the Government depots and silos. However the private sector account for the majority of food grains stock in Bangladesh and Government does not have any visibility of these stocks, which have a huge influence on the retail market. The Government can identify all key private players in food grains value chain and bring them under a single monitoring system at a national level. This can be possible by gaining access to the private food grain stocks and exports data, capturing, cleaning, storing and consolidating those data, and integrating them eventually into the existing national monitoring system. This will enable the Government to monitor and report the national stock and plan and take decisions related to price, import and procurement.
A reasonably good estimate of the private stock of food grains will also ensure proper formulation and implementation of public policies on domestic food grain procurement, import and disposal in Bangladesh. Alternatively, the Government can estimate the buffer stock requirement over and above the Government food grain stock to maintain the National Food Security, and involve the private players to bring only that portion of their privately held stocks under the national monitoring system.
